Sunday, May 20, 2007

Not blogging but some of the patina of belief, well, hold on, let me explain.

It's only taken roughly five years, maybe almost five and a half if you date the start of blogging to roughly the end of 2001, when Tom Tomorrow's blog "This Modern World" went on the air, but it looks like everyone in the blog world is falling into their respective slots, and that those slots are somewhat conventional.

Fresh voices, yes, but fresh perspectives? Only moderately so. It seems as though with a few alterations everything is sifting down into the regular divisions: mainstream liberal, ultra-liberal but not progressive, progressive, radical, with some divisions in the latter. This is largely what existed before blogging, and the two most innovative realms; i.e. that of progressive thought that doesn't fit into mainstream liberalism and that of radical thought, are innovative because they were innovative before blogging started. Progressives, like Michael Moore, Jim Hightower, Moly Ivins, came on the scene because of the deficiency in mainstream liberalism regarding social justice and corporations. They largely resurged and invented themselves as they went along. In other words, developed something new. The same can be said of the resurgence of radical thought in America. Both in socialist world and in the specifically anarchist world radicalism has had to basically reinvent itself post-Soviet Union, in relation to socialism but also in relation to the new world dynamics that have taken the place of cold war politics.....which would be globalization. Some, ahem, radical theorists have also attempted to analyze how the current Bush administration post-9/11 has altered the political scene. The only real innovation beyond what existed before blogging is that the country really is split more between Red and Blue, and bloggers reflect that, but that's not due to blogging itself. But that aside, the point is that despite the explosion of people talking about things, what they talk about and how they talk about it is pretty normal.

Chalk a belief in something else coming out of this up to naivete on my part.

In the end things don't happen for no reason.

*on edit: no, that's bullshit. Plenty of things happen for no reason. What I should have said was that no new things happen for no reason.

**on second edit: liberals left of center are anti-war. That's new. But how far beyond Iraq does this new commitment go?